Death in The Life

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “A couple of questions here,” the bigger of the two men said, getting in after her, “and the rest we’ll get under better conditions.” Russo went around the car and got in the other side. The man in charge introduced himself. “I’m Lieutenant Donleavy, Homicide. Detective Russo is a precinct officer.”

  “I think I know Mrs. Russo,” Julie said.

  “Good.”

  She gave her name and home address and then added, “I have… I guess you’d call it a business address on Forty-fourth Street”

  “What kind of business, Mrs. Hayes?”

  “I tell fortunes.” Christ! What difference did it make?

  “Well, now, aren’t we in luck?” Donleavy said.

  “Please… Tell me what happened to Pete.”

  “How do you know it’s him, miss?”

  “I don’t. I just feel that it is. Which is crazy, except that he is missing.”

  “Do you know Rita Morgan?”

  “I don’t really know her. She came into my shop a couple of times. But I didn’t know she lived in this building.”

  “Did you know she was an acquaintance of… Mallory, is it?”

  “No.”

  “But he is a friend of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “It’s over a week, but I talked with him on the phone—that’s over a week too, but he was going to meet me at the theater tonight. He’s a scene designer. When I asked for him, they said he hadn’t been there for the opening last night, that they tried to find him but couldn’t.”

  Russo took the name and address of the New Irish Theatre. Julie, remembering the program in her pocket, gave it to the detective.

  “Now, miss, when did you last see Rita Morgan?”

  “I think it was the same day.” Julie tried to remember the sequence… she had seen Doctor Callahan, Rita had gone by with the cowboy and then came back alone… Mrs. Rodriguez and then that night the call from Pete. “It was Friday, a week ago yesterday.”

  “Where?”

  “In my shop at the address I gave you, sir.”

  “Was she in the habit of patronizing your shop?” Donleavy asked.

  “She wanted someone to talk to, lieutenant. In a way that’s what my business is all about.”

  “What business is she in?”

  Julie hesitated. To no point: they would find out. “She was on the street.”

  “That isn’t your line, is it?”

  “No, sir. No way.”

  “It will take us longer without your help, Mrs. Hayes,” the lieutenant said, “but in the end we’ll find out all there is to know about Rita. Prostitutes have a hard time keeping secrets. If your friend is the homicide victim, I think you’d want to tell us everything you can, now, wouldn’t you?”

  Julie nodded. “If.”

  Russo said, “Someone was the victim, and the crime did occur in her apartment.”

  “I have the feeling she hasn’t been around for several days. I’ll tell you what I can.” It wasn’t Rita she was trying to protect, that didn’t matter now. What held her back was not knowing whether or not the girl had seen Doctor Callahan. Under no circumstances did she want to involve Doctor. “The day before yesterday a man named Mack came into my place looking for her.”

  “That would be her pimp,” Russo said.

  “Yes.”

  Donleavy asked, “Do you know him, Russo?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s the only white regular on the street. He’s got an assault record, narcotics, and he’s tied in with the Romano outfit.”

  Donleavy grunted. “Can you give us a description of the woman, Mrs. Hayes? The key things for now—something we can use with the people in the building so we can find out when she was last seen around here.”

  “She’s about my height and build, five foot two, a hundred ten pounds. She’s sixteen years old…”

  “That young?” he interrupted.

  “I thought she was even younger. She looks like a child, not a bit like the others, and she wants desperately to get out of The Life and go home. That’s what she came in to talk to me about.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me. I did ask that.”

  “Go on with the description.”

  Russo took down such details as Julie gave, even to the look of innocence in the girl’s smile.

  Donleavy shook his head as though at the misery of it all. Julie liked him better than she had at first.

  “We’ll get to your friend in a minute,” he said then. “I’m going to tell you how the complaint came in. The reason I’m doing this is to see if anything in it rings a bell with you. Nine-one-one got a missing persons call tonight about seven from an unidentified male caller. He gave her name and address. They tried to switch him to Missing Persons but he hung up. The first precinct men available made a routine check. The apartment door was unlocked. The officers investigated and found the victim. He had been dead for at least twenty-four hours. There was no identification on him, no wallet, no keys. Male, white, about thirty years old, slender build, height just under six feet, light brown hair that curls at the nape of his neck.”

  “It sounds very much like Pete,” Julie said.

  “All right. Put that aside for a minute. You’d be surprised how many men would fit that description. The one thing that’s sure is the victim did not call the police. Who did?”

  “Mack?”

  “He’s a strong possibility. We’ll pick him up for questioning as soon as we can find him. Would you know of any connection between him and your friend?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It seems to me,” Russo said, “Mack would have been on the scene earlier than tonight. He’d have wanted her out there hustling over the weekend.”

  Julie remembered Mack’s having said this to her: “Tell her to get her ass out on the street. I’ve got a big weekend coming up and I need the money.” She told it now. Then: “There was a man in town with the rodeo at the Garden. She made kind of a joke of it, saying she could get him to marry her. I saw them together. Coming here, I guess. Afterwards she came back to see me; it was as though she wanted to prove to me that she really was a whore.”

  “Did she mention him by name?”

  “No. She said he came from Laramie. She’d been with him more than once.”

  “Would you know him again if you saw him?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good girl,” Donleavy said. “Here’s the hard one now, little lady. Do you think you could go to the morgue with Detective Russo and see if you can identify the victim?”

  After a minute, Julie nodded. “Somebody has to do it.”

  The police radio chattered all the way downtown. Now and then the driver, to part traffic for them, used his siren. That Julie was inside the scene instead of outside was crazy. She didn’t really know Pete at all. He had said it himself. And where was she if Pete was not… at the end of this mad ride? If it was not Pete Mallory? She would have involved herself unnecessarily, and God knows who else she would have involved. In time the police might have come to her about Rita. Doctor had warned her… There was no use looking back. No use.

  Detective Russo, riding in the back seat with her, smoked silently, thoughtfully. He put the cigarette out on the floor and then threw it out the window. “Was it you that told my wife I was going to get a promotion?”

  Whatever she’d expected him to ask, it wasn’t that. “I didn’t exactly say it. The number two kept coming up, and when I asked her if it meant anything to her, she said detective second grade. But it was me, yes, sir.”

  “Women are something,” he said.

  “She didn’t come in cold, Detective Russo. Mrs. Ryan introduced us.” Then: “Did you get the promotion?”

  “No, but I was thinking about it just now. It used to be that I’d have been in charge of this investigation—the precinct detective answering the complaint. They’ve changed the system. I wasn’t t
hinking about promotion—or maybe I was. No. What I was thinking, this is a neighborhood crime, and damn few cops in New York know that neighborhood like I do.”

  “And you should be back there asking questions instead of here,” Julie said.

  “No. This is important. But if they take me off the case after tonight, they’ll be losing a good man. And I’ll be losing … what?”

  “The chance to prove it,” Julie said.

  “Exactly. It’s like a machine they’re running, like you could put all the facts into a computer. Okay. But first you got to know if they’re facts. Crimes are committed by people. Maybe they don’t act human, but underneath, that’s what they are. This girl Rita, whatever else she is, what’s more human than wanting to go home?”

  “Right.”

  “Is that where she is now?”

  “I wish I knew,” Julie said.

  “What I’m getting at is this: That pad of hers was as clean as a bone of personal effects. I don’t think she could have cleaned out a place she’d lived in for even a few weeks if there was a guy lying there dead while she was doing it. You go in and out with trash, right? And there wasn’t any trash. That had all been cleaned out ahead of time. Now either she was already gone and somebody else is the perpetrator or else this John came along at the last minute and something happened: he interrupted her plan or else he was part of the plan. Premeditated.”

  “How was he killed?”

  “We have to wait for the medical examiner to tell us for sure. There wasn’t any weapon, but it looks like a knife job.”

  Julie weighed the knife information. Before she had made up her mind whether or not to tell now that Rita had said she had one, Russo went on.

  “There was one hell of a struggle…” The detective thought the better of further speculation aloud. “There’s a lot of technical work to be done, and that’ll tell us something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Whether they’d had sex, for one thing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry,” Russo said.

  Neither of them spoke again until the car pulled up outside the Medical Examiner’s office.

  “This is going to be rough,” Russo warned. “Have you ever seen a dead person?”

  “My mother.”

  He took her arm.

  The bleak, fluorescent lights inside the building, the murmur and soft sobs of waiting, frightened people, mostly black, who found no surcease from their own horror in the company of others whose horror might be as great. A whispery, cavernous sanctuary of violent death, of doom… doom… He’s doomed, Mrs. Ryan had said of Pete. How could she have known?

  Russo checked in with a medical examiner who immediately dialed an inside phone number. Julie picked up the words autopsy room.

  “They haven’t taken him in yet,” the gray man said, hanging up the phone. He took off his sports jacket and put on a dirty white coat, and then led the way through a corridor to a heavy steel door.

  Russo held onto Julie’s arm with hard ringers. “Breathe through your mouth,” he said, “and remember death stinks. Let me go down ahead of you.”

  The sickly sweet odor came up like a rotten blanket into her face. She clung to the railing going down the narrow, curved stairwell. From the moment she started down, she kept her eyes on Detective Russo’s back; she saw on the periphery of her vision, nonetheless, the wall of drawers and the sacked forms on wheeled tables. She thought of Jeff who often spoke of walking among the dead, the battlefield dead, the flood dead, the living dead, the dead living. Which was how she felt. And flies. Where had flies come from so early in April? Or were they always here waiting new carrion? She kept thinking of Jeff, his fastidious nose wrinkled in distaste at some social gaucherie, and his hard straightnosed probe into work that had to be done no matter how difficult. Somebody had to do it—when she had said that, she was quoting Jeff. No matter what or where his assignment, he always said, Somebody has to do it, and set about packing his bags.

  They waited, the examiner ordering by number the corpse he wanted delivered. Her eyes met Russo’s large, dark Italian eyes, liquid with sympathy and then, at the wavering of hers, growing tough and fixed, as though to keep her on her feet The attendant grinned at her and, on his way, moved as though he relished his job, a jaunty, devil-may-care stride. He even slapped, as he might a girl’s ass, a bagged corpse as he passed it. Her hatred for him stiffened her, helped her endure. He wheeled in the sheeted figure and maneuvered the trolley with the flair of a car-park jockey. He flashed her a smile again.

  “Goddamn you.” She must have said it aloud, for Detective Russo squeezed her arm.

  “That’s the girl,” he said. “You’re all right?”

  “You bet.”

  The medical examiner took hold of the covering with heavy, thick fingers and after the briefest hesitation lifted it away from the face of the victim.

  It was Pete. Gray as putty, the eyes closed, the mouth still open as though he had been about to speak when he no longer could. But unmistakably Pete.

  Julie nodded and put her hand to where his arm might be underneath the coarse sheet. There was an awful softness where she had expected stone. Detective Russo turned her away and guided her to the steps. They climbed up and up a staircase, it seemed, without an end. Then at last the door. A way out

  Russo gave her a chair in an anteroom to the main office and brought her water in a paper cup. She shook her head. She could still smell death. She was afraid she’d be sick if she took the water, for the smell was also a taste.

  Russo drank the water himself and threw the cup into a wastebasket. He sat at the desk with his notebook open. “His full name, Mrs. Hayes?”

  She spelled the last name.

  “Do you know his next of kin?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Any relatives in New York that you know of?”

  “I don’t think there are any, but I don’t really know.”

  Russo phoned her identification to the precinct desk where it was to be relayed at once to Donleavy.

  By the time they got out to the waiting car, Donleavy had radioed instructions that Russo was to get Mrs. Hayes’s complete statement and have it transcribed and signed before going off duty.

  All Julie could think of was the guy at the morgue trundling Pete around like a side of beef. Except that it wasn’t Pete anymore. It wouldn’t matter much to Pete what they did with the remains. To whom would it matter… besides herself?

  Russo tape-recorded her statement, playing phrases back when she asked so that she could qualify or elaborate. “Just tell it in your own way,” he had asked, “everything about the girl you can remember, about the pimp, the cowboy, anything that comes to mind. Then we’ll go over it again and see what else we can squeeze out. Okay?”

  Just like Doctor, except for the squeeze part. She was trying hard to convince herself that Rita would not have called Doctor Callahan. But if she had called her, it was Doctor’s business to decide whether or not the police should know about it. Once Julie had clarified that issue in her own mind, she was better able to deal with Russo’s questions. And somewhere along in the interrogation, she became aware of the human being trying to coax out of her his next assignment, as it were. A lot was riding for him on poor Pete’s death. Russo couldn’t be much over thirty, dark complexioned, very Italian looking, a neighborhood kid who grew up to be a cop, and then one step more, a detective. She felt caring of him, almost maternal, and much older. It was a good feeling in the midst of so much that was strange and bad.

  Julie waited a long time in the cubicle of a room with its single window protected by wire mesh. Then, because no one had said she had to stay there, she wandered in the hall, stepping aside for patrolmen and their prisoners on the way to the briefing room or detention cells, whores and derelicts, sullen captives… She looked into the briefing room in passing, the walls hung with wanted flyers, the long table crowded with cops and perpetrators, one to one in their paired co
ncern with the offense that had brought them together. Julie found herself wishing she could go in and look into the face of each one of them and ask the question, Why?

  A wall clock showed one-thirty.

  She went back to where Russo had left her and waited. He had promised to take or send her home in a police car after she read and signed her transcribed statement. When he returned with it, he brought along a carton of coffee for her. She read carefully, noticing that everything was left in, qualifications, corrections following that which she had corrected, even to Rita’s mention of her kid brother. She felt she had been thorough. Russo had been even more so.

  Just as she was signing, Donleavy came into the little room and crowded it with his presence. He waited until she was finished and then said, “Take a walk through the briefing room with Detective Russo, Mrs. Hayes. See if there’s anyone in there you recognize.”

  There were more black faces than white and only a sentimental fool would say what their expressions meant. The only why that concerned most of them was why they had been caught. They came to a middle-aged man, well-dressed, his arms folded; his face was yellowish, like a faded suntan, and the mark of a hat band came just beneath his hairline. After a brief glimpse at Julie, he stared with bloodshot eyes at the uniformed cop opposite him. Unlike the other officers at the table, this one had no notebook before him. He was sitting in, a dummy. Julie hardly knew whether she recognized the cowboy or deduced who he was. He was third from the end.

  “I wouldn’t want to say positively,” Julie qualified when they returned to where Donleavy was waiting in the corridor.

  “Not necessary,” Donleavy said. “A psychological test on the gent, you might say. Thank you very much, Mrs. Hayes.”

  13

  SHE AWOKE STRUGGLING OUT of a horrible, disgusting dream. In it she was about to have her picture taken, hundreds of people around, and she had turned for a quick look into a mirror. But it was not her face that she saw, it was the oval of her backside as though she were bent over, and in its center was a glowering, rheumy eye.

  The phone rang. What had awakened her was the clicking sound that sometimes preceded the ring. Just as she picked up the receiver she remembered what had happened the night before.